Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Historical Events to Consider
World War I 1914-1918
World War II 1939-1945
The Titanic Sank in 1912
The 19th Amendment was passed in 1920
Known Influences (Gould 22)
Shakespeare
Browning
Coleridge
Keats
Tennyson
Shelly
Biographical Summary
Critical attention to Edna St Vincent Millay‘s work began when she was nineteen years old as a
result of a contest in association with The Lyric Year, an anthology of the best works written in
1912. Although she did not win the contest, the poem she submitted, entitled “Renascence,” was
praised as the best work in the anthology (Epstein 51). Millay wrote “Renascence” at a very
young age without having gone to college or received any formal training in poetry. However, as
a result of this publication, Millay was given a scholarship to Vassar to study poetry (Epstein
71). What resulted was Renascence and Other Poems, published in 1917. This publication
marked only the beginning of her success. Edna St Vincent Millay went on to publish multiple
volumes of poetry, including sonnets, the form for which she is now most celebrated. She
received numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, the first ever awarded
to a woman, for The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. Major publishing events celebrated the
emergence of each volume of her poetry, as her collections initially achieved both critical praise
as well as mainstream popularity (Gould 153).
However, with the rise of Modernism and the development of New Criticism in response to such
poets as TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, academic audiences prioritized displays of intellect over
accessibility. The tradition of the modernist poets included appealing to an elite audience who
had the knowledge to decipher obscure allusions and complicated references. Therefore, as
Millay‘s popularity grew with mainstream audiences, critics began to question her abilities,
doubting that these readers could appreciate the work of a legitimately talented poet (Epstein
248). With the publication of Millay‘s Huntsman, What Quarry (1939), a collection of poetry
which was largely regarded as propaganda because of its alluded support of the United States’
involvement in World War II, scholarly interest in her work declined. She is said to have been
the “last important poet to hold the interest of the ‘serious general reader’” (Epstein xv).
Key Terms to Consider in Close Reading of “Renascence”
Bildungsroman: story of the development of a young
person from Adolescence to maturity; often
biographical (Harmon 59)
Enjambment: the continuation of the sense and
grammatical construction of a line onto the next verse
or couplet. Enjambment occurs in run-on lines and
offers a contrast to end-stopped lines (Harmon 186)
Alliteration: the repetition of initial identical
consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in successive or closely associated syllables (Harmon 13)
Millay’s Sonnets
English or Shakespearean Sonnet: a poem of fourteen lines with a very specific rhyme scheme,
three quatrains and a rhymed concluding couplet. The typical rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg
(Harmon 488)
Questions for Discussion
 Who is the speaker and who is the speaker addressing in each of these poems?
 What differences in tone do you hear amongst and between Millay’s sonnets?
 How does Millay’s use of the word “love” differ among the poems?
 What seems to be the larger social, cultural, and moral context in which such “love” is
contemplated or experienced?
Harp-Weaver and Other Poems
Millay Reads “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Og6p_XC5w
A Selected Bibliography of Poetry
Renascence and Other Poems (1917)
A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
Second April (1921)
The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923)
Distressing Dialogues (1924)
Fatal Interview (1931)
Conversations at Midnight (1937)
Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)
Make Bright the Arrows (1940)
Invocation of the Muses (1941)
Collected Sonnets (1941)
Collected Lyrics (1943)
Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army
(1944)
Collected Poems (1949)
Mine the Harvest (1954)
Collected Poems (1956)
Works Cited
Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St.
Vincent Millay. New York: Holt Publishing, 2002.
Gould, Jean. The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St Vincent Millay. New York: Dodd,
Mead, and Company, 1969.
Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature, 7th ed. Upper Saddle River,
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996.